Weathering Young Thug’s Tornado

Image

The Atlanta rapper Young Thug. His day's are self-directed, frenetic, prone to detours. He may not be the only renegade left in hip-hop, but he’s certainly the most intriguing.CreditCreditChad Batka for The New York Times

SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. — Just after midnight on the day in August that Young Thug turned 24, he sat impassively as a makeup artist applied ghoulish white gunk to his face.

A small crew was using his house in this quiet, bucolic suburb just north of Atlanta to film a video for “Best Friend,” his zippy new song. Thug’s head — everyone calls him Thug, though he was born Jeffrey Williams — was to pop up from under a serving dish lid on his dining room table and rap while a couple of his sisters sat around the table, dancing in their chairs.

Thug ashed a blunt into a ramen container while his director, Be El Be, set up the lighting. One hour passed. Then two, then three. One of his sons — he has six children — was passed out on a couch. Food arrived at random intervals: four Dominos pizzas in the late evening, a birthday cake just after midnight, a couple of catering trays of wings at 1:30 a.m.

Eventually, the weed cloud in the room got cotton-candy thick, and Thug was called to the dining room for his scene.

This is how Young Thug’s days go: self-directed, frenetic, prone to detours. He may not be the only renegade left in hip-hop, but he’s certainly the most intriguing. For the last couple of years, he’s been one of the most crucial innovators in the genre, a master of bending his voice into radical shapes. His signature gobbledygook helped propel “Lifestyle,” by Rich Gang (which also features Baby and Rich Homie Quan), to No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s the stuff of several outstanding mixtapes, including “1017 Thug,” “I Came From Nothing 3” and “Black Portland.” It has anchored street anthems like “Stoner” and “Danny Glover,” and added zest and quirk to songs with T.I., Rae Sremmurd, Nicki Minaj and more.

Harnessing his sui generis gift has been a more perplexing challenge: Thug moves at his own rhythm. On any given day, there are songs being recorded (or not), videos being filmed (or not), an album being finished (or not). His proper major label debut, “Hy!£UN35,” on 300/Atlantic, has a seemingly elastic release date. There are squabbles with other rappers, misunderstandings with his girlfriend, a gaggle of family members always in close orbit. A day with Thug pinballs from one twist to the next.

Several hours later, after some sleep, Thug was in the screening room on the second floor of the impressively sized, mostly brown and beige house, obsessively scrolling through Instagram and taking birthday calls. His stringy dreadlocks were gathered in a loose bun and dyed a misty gray. His teeth were gold. His Apple watch was ringed with diamonds. Versace boxer briefs poked out atop asphyxiatingly thin Balmain jeans.

Downstairs, family members were gathering for a birthday laser-tag outing. But every few minutes, it seemed like something might grab Thug’s attention and spin it in a new direction.

Image

The rapper Young Thug, left, and the engineer Alex Tumay at the Atlantic Records recording studio in New York.CreditChad Batka for The New York Times

He was talking about the public’s perception of him — “There’s nothing that they think that’s right” — when he stopped cold for a minute. His girlfriend of a couple of years, Jerrika, had just texted him. Days earlier, with no warning, she had accused Thug of disloyalty in an Instagram post — “Some people are so broken that they are unable to be loved,” she wrote.

“I’m frustrated,” he said. “She just dipped off on me. Why you do that? You gonna just leave me in this house like this? You one of the main reasons I got it!”

For much of the past year, the two have painted a refreshing picture of shared bliss on social media, but Jerrika had read some compromising texts on his phone. Thug insisted his infidelities were virtual, not actual. “I just was, like, being a mack, being lame like, ‘I miss you,’ If a ho’ text me right now I’d be like: ‘What you doing? Come see me.’ But I don’t want no ho’ to see me.” Jerrika didn’t believe him. (At press time, they’d reunited.)

A few minutes later, his publicist appeared to ask if a new video, “Again,” should be posted online given Thug’s recent legal troubles. In the video, Thug is surrounded by a comical amount of guns and drugs — all props, his manager said. A month earlier, the local police and the A.T.F. had raided this same house after Thug was arrested on suspicion of making terroristic threats to a security officer at Perimeter Mall in Atlanta. In news footage, officers could be seen going through the cars on the property, and one of his sisters tried to physically block the cameraman from filming.

Thug seemed to be handing the attention with a shrug. He took a minute to call his lawyer but got voicemail. He went back to Instagram. The video went up the next day.

Another interruption: Lyor Cohen, the macher of 300, checking in via FaceTime from his New York beach house, was wearing a robe and singing “Happy Birthday.” Mr. Cohen swept the camera around his home. “You see the sailboats out there?” he asked. Thug asked him for a Red Dragon camera for his birthday. “Let me see what I can do about that, son,” Mr. Cohen replied.

A few days earlier, Thug had been in the New York office of 300, where the walls are covered in vintage hip-hop photos of 1980s and 1990s rappers. Thug regarded them like documentation of an ancient, foreign culture, recognizing almost none of them.

Young Thug isn’t 100 percent ahistorical, but he’s happy not to be burdened by the genre’s old expectations and frameworks. As a young rapper, he idolized Lil Wayne, and little else. Now he has surpassed his idol, and at a tricky moment: Lil Wayne has lately been squabbling with Baby, the record executive who long served as his surrogate father, and Baby has been doting attention and time on Young Thug. In April, Lil Wayne’s tour bus was shot at in Atlanta, and the police have attempted to tie Baby and Young Thug to the incident.

Thug and Lil Wayne have also squared off over music. In April, Thug released “Barter 6,” what he described as a continuation of Lil Wayne’s “Carter” mixtape series, to Lil Wayne’s displeasure: “I’m not just being lame or trying to do something smooth. I told the whole world you my idol, and whenever you stop I’m gonna keep going.

Image

Young Thug performing at SummerStage in Central Park in August.CreditEliana Rowe/City Parks Foundation

“Both of us grew up the same thing, the same gang man — Y.M.C.M.B.,” he continued, referring to the empire Baby built. “Why should you ever in your life even feel like we against each other?”

At Lil Wayne’s peak, he was recording dozens of songs a month. Thug does much the same, a practice he developed while working under the currently incarcerated Atlanta legend Gucci Mane. For more than a year, Thug watched him: “Three stories, real house, studio built in them, five different studios, five rooms, never left.”

The studio is the place where the swirl of activity around Thug calms down the most. Shortly before his birthday, he was in New York for a typically jam-packed day: filming scenes for the video of “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times),” his single with the British producer Jamie xx; doing a quick Boiler Room performance with Jamie xx; then retiring to Platinum Sound, a cozy warren studio in a nondescript Midtown building for a late-night session.

At the studio, Thug kicked off his shoes to reveal pristine white socks and ate cashews one at a time while talking about his gambling predilections: “I used to get caught at school with like 10 pair of dice. I lost over $100,000 with LeBron James and didn’t watch not one game.”

Mr. Tumay loaded up some music, beginning with already finished songs, and eventually cycled through a set of new beats. Meanwhile Thug talked about his recent arrest at the mall. “I literally be walking in there with lean, gun in my pants. It’s no cops in there ever.” The judge, he said, was sympathetic: “He said: ‘You spent $10,000 on that day when you threatened him. Why would I not let you go the mall?’ ”

After a few minutes of banter, Thug picked a beat by Mike Will Made It and, Styrofoam cup of prescription cough syrup in hand, retreated into the booth. The lights were out — all you could see was the glint of his Rich Gang chain.

The recording process began with some melodic mumbles. Thug figures the lyrics out piecemeal. He doesn’t allow himself to leave the booth until the song is finished. He writes nothing down.

So he sat in the dark and, a few words at a time, built the song from scratch. He wrote his own melodies and countermelodies. From the control room, you could hear him going over certain sections dozens of times, as if he were pushing against a huge boulder until it moved just a bit, then steeling himself to do it all again

Eventually, the hook came to sound like something the reggae singer Barrington Levy might do, a plangent wail. In the verse, he veered from sentimental — “I was so jealous when I caught you flirting” — to vicious: “I’m a dog on these ho’s, no vet.”

About 30 minutes after he began, Thug had the song finished. Mr. Tumay played it back for him a couple of times. The studio was still, almost dull. Still sitting in the dark, Thug asked, “Want me to ad lib?” He had nowhere else to be.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section AR, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Weathering Young Thug’s Tornado. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe